“Design Mart,” held at the London Design Museum’s new Space, featured 15 up-and-coming furniture and product designers showing—and selling—their wares.

Disposable newspaper dresses, lights made out of sheep stomachs, barbed wire decorated with butterflies: is this the future of design? Yes, according to London’s Design Museum. “Design Mart,” an exhibit held from Sept. 23-26 in the museum’s new Space, featured 15 up-and-coming furniture and product designers showing—and selling—their wares. The group, chosen by an advisory panel that included Ron Arad,…

Architects can’t resist the lure of buildings—even if the brief doesn’t really call for them.

In May, two days before the Seattle Central Library’s official opening, the building’s architect, Rem Koolhaas, discussed the structure with Metropolis contributing editor Christopher Hawthorne. The interview took place in a staff conference room on the library’s 11th floor; the room’s floor-to-ceiling interior windows offered an exceptionally good view of the building’s dramatic, open central core, and, through windows on…

Most writing on architecture treats the profession as a realm of sole authorship, where One Big Name is heaped with praise, quoted extensively, and ultimately held responsible for whether a building succeeds or fails. The truth, of course, is so much more complex that even a book-length work wouldn’t do the process justice. It isn’t just that there are engineers…